Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (24 page)

“I knew the factory wasn’t perfect,” Warren Woomer would say later, “but we were constantly improving it. Until Ashraf’s death
we’d had an excellent safety record unique in the company’s history.” The American works manager could see no reason why this
situation should deteriorate. He had blind faith in his colleagues. After all it was he who had trained them in Carbide’s
celebrated safety culture. He knew that the four hundred pages of notes they had compiled on their return from Institute were
their bible. A man’s death was a dreadful blow but it should not cast disgrace upon the whole system. Despite the budget cuts
to some of the equipment at the time of construction, Woomer was convinced that he commanded one of the safest ships in the
modern industrial fleet. And the factory management dismissed these demonstrations as just a campaign by agitators in search
of higher salaries and shorter working hours.

It was one of thousands of weekly newspapers that India published in its innumerable languages. Bhopal’s
Rapat Weekly
was in Hindi, and its modest circulation—six thousand copies— gave it very little impact in a mostly Muslim city where the
predominant language was Urdu. The reliability of its investigative journalism and its independent voice had, nevertheless,
earned the
Weekly
a fringe readership with a taste for scandal. Digging into the latter was the particular slant the founder and only editor
of the
Rapat Weekly
had chosen.

The son and grandson of journalists, thirty-four-year-old Hindu Rajkumar Keswani belonged to a family originally from the
province of Sind, who had come to Bhopal after the partition of India in 1947. At sixteen he had left college to contribute
to a sports journal, then worked at the city news desk of the
Bhopal Post
. For years this indefatigable investigator had reported on the minor and major events that occurred in the City of the Begums.
After the
Post
folded, Keswani had sunk his savings into the creation of a small weekly to serve the true interests of Bhopal’s citizens.
For this man mad about poetry, botany and music, the threat posed by modern industry to the safety of the city was very real.
The discovery of irregularities in the allocation of industrial licenses drove him to look for collusion between Carbide and
the local authorities. The mysterious fire in the alpha-naphthol unit had already tickled his curiosity. The poisoning of
Mohammed Ashraf clinched the matter. He embarked upon an investigation that might have turned him into a savior, if only people
had listened to him.

“As luck would have it, I knew Ashraf,” he would recount. “He lived just next door to the fire station where I’d set up my
office. He often had comrades from work round to his house. Together, they would talk about the dangers of their profession.
They spoke about toxic gases, deadly leaks and the likelihood of explosion. Some of them made no secret of their intention
to resign. I’d thought the plant was producing an innocent white powder, like the one I used to protect the roses on my terrace
from greenfly, and I found what they said terrifying.”

No sooner had he carried his friend Ashraf to his grave, than the journalist rushed to see the deceased’s colleagues. “I wanted
to know whether his death was an isolated incident or the result of some failure on the part of the factory.”

Keswani gathered enough witness statements to accuse Carbide of negligently violating its own safety standards. Bashir Ullah,
one of the dismissed trade union leaders, even managed to smuggle the journalist inside the site at night. As he went through
the various production units, he could smell phosgene’s odor of freshly cut grass and methyl isocyanate’s aroma of boiled
cabbage.

Not having any scientific training, he next paid a visit to the dean of the chemistry department at an important technical
college and consulted all the specialists’ works in its library. The conclusions he came to made his blood run cold.

“Merely appreciating that methyl isocyanate and phosgene are two and a half times heavier than air, and have a tendency to
move along at ground level in small clouds, was enough to make me realize at once that a large scale gas leak would be disastrous,”
he explained later. “After detailed examination of the safety systems in place in the plant, I knew that tragedy was only
a matter of time.”

An unexpected visit was to provide Rajkumar Keswani with the technical arguments he needed to drop his journalistic bombshell.
In May 1982, three American engineers from the technical center for chemical products and household plastics division in South
Charleston landed in Bhopal. Their task was to appraise the running of the plant and confirm that everything was functioning
according to the standards laid down by Carbide. None of Carbide’s critics outside the plant expected this internal investigation
to produce any great revelations. However, the investigators uncovered over sixty breaches of operational and safety regulations.

With the help of accomplices in the factory, Keswani managed to get hold of the text of the audit. He could not believe his
eyes. The document described the surroundings of the site “strewn with oily old drums, used piping, pools of used oil and
chemical waste likely to cause fire.” It condemned the shoddy workmanship on certain connections, the warping of equipment,
the corrosion of several circuits, the absence of automatic sprinklers in the MIC and phosgene production zones, the risk
of explosion in the gas evacuation flares. It cited the poor positioning of certain devices likely to trap their operators
in case of fire or toxic leakage. It criticized the lack of pressure gauges and the inadequate identification of innumerable
pieces of equipment. It reported leaks of phosgene, MIC and chloroform, ruptures in pipework and sealed joints, the absence
of any earth electrical connection on one of the three MIC tanks, the impossibility of isolating many of the circuits because
of the deterioration of their valves, the poor adjustment of devices where excessive pressure was in danger of allowing water
into the circuits. It revealed the fact that the needle on the pressure gauge of a phosgene tank full of gas was stuck on
zero. It expressed alarm at the poor state and inappropriate placement of safety equipment to be used in case of leakage or
fire, and at the lack of periodic checks to ensure sophisticated instruments and alarm systems were functioning correctly.

All the same it was in the area of personnel that the report came up with the most startling revelations. It expressed concern
at an alarming turnover of inadequately trained staff, unsatisfactory instruction methods and a lack of rigor in maintenance
reports. Three lines in the fifty-one pages described a particularly serious mistake: an engineer had cleaned out a section
of pipework without blocking off the two ends of the pipe with discs designed to prevent the rinsing water from seeping into
other parts of the installation. One day this same sort of negligence would spark a tragedy.

“
KINDLY SPARE OUR CITY
!” exclaimed Rajkumar Keswani in the headline of his first article, published on September 17, 1982. Illustrating the risk
the factory represented with numerous examples, the journalist appealed first to those in charge of it. “You are endangering
our entire agglomeration, starting with the Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai Prakash districts nestling against the walls of your
installations.” Then, addressing his fellow citizens, Keswani urged them to wake up to the danger that Union Carbide represented
to their lives. “If one day disaster strikes,” he warned them, “don’t say that you did not know.”

Unfortunate Keswani! Like Cassandra, he had been given the gift of predicting catastrophe, but not that of persuasion. His
first article passed almost unnoticed. Carbide was too firmly planted on its pedestal for a few alarming words in a sensationalist
newspaper to topple it.

Undaunted, the journalist returned to the fray two weeks later. “
BHOPAL: WE ARE SITTING ON A VOLCANO
,” announced the
Rapat Weekly
of September 30, 1982, in block letters across the front page. “The day is not far off when Bhopal will be a dead city, when
only scattered stones and debris will bear witness to its tragic end,” the author prophesied. The article’s disclosures should
have sent the entire city rushing to the Kali Grounds to demand the plant’s immediate closure. They did not. Sadly, the
Rapat Weekly
was a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

The following week, a third article entitled, “
IF YOU REFUSE TO UNDERSTAND, YOU WILL BE REDUCED TO DUST
,” described in detail the leak, which four days earlier had led to the evacuation of the factory in the middle of the night
and the general scramble on the part of the residents of Orya Bustee and its adjacent neighborhoods.

In the end so much indifference and blindness disheartened the journalist. It appeared that the anger over Ashraf’s death
and the hunger strikes had been short-lived. If the Bhopalis preferred to believe the protestations of safety issued by Carbide—
lies as far as Keswani was concerned—he would leave them to their fate. He scuttled his newspaper, packed his music collection
in two suitcases and bought a train ticket for Indore, where a big daily newspaper offered him a golden opportunity. Before
he left Bhopal, however, he wanted to respond to a statement made on the parliamentary rostrum of the state of Madhya Pradesh.
“There is no cause for concern about the presence of the Carbide factory because the phosgene it produces is not a toxic gas,”
the minister of employment had declared. In two long letters Keswani summarized the findings of his investigations. He addressed
the first to the state’s highest authority, Chief Minister Arjun Singh, whose links with the Carbide management were common
knowledge. The second he sent to the president of the supreme court, along with a petition requesting the closure of the factory.
Neither of the two letters received a reply.

E
veryone to the teahouse! Ganga has a surprise for us!”

Rahul sped along like lightning on his wheeled plank, bearing the news from alleyway to alleyway. Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash
at once emptied themselves of their occupants. Their vitality and their incredible ability to mobilize were the hallmarks
of these disinherited people. With each of her weekly visits, Sister Felicity became more and more convinced that the poor
she came to help were stronger than any misfortune.

The man who was promising them a big surprise was one of the most respected characters in the three bustees. With the passage
of the years, Ganga Ram had become, like Belram Mukkadam and the godfather Omar Pasha, one of the Kali Grounds’ influential
figures. His rejection by a Carbide tharagar a few years previously had not diminished his spirit of resistance. The same
year he tried and failed to be hired at the plant, Ganga found a new trade. A few days before Diwali, the festival of lights
and prosperity and the time when all Hindus repaint their houses, Ganga had turned himself into a house painter. In order
to buy himself a ladder, a bucket and some brushes, he had paid a visit to another leprosy survivor, whom he had helped during
his tenure at Hamidia Hospital. Welcomed as if he were the god Rama himself, Ganga had been able to borrow the money he needed.
Two years later his business had six employees. Success had not gone to his head, however. Ganga Ram, together with his wife
Dalima and her adopted son, had not left the neighborhood where once four lines drawn with a stick in the dust had provided
them with shelter. Dalima was a great favorite in the community. Everyone adored this bright young woman with her green eyes
and her tattooed hands, who got about on her crutches without complaining and always with a smile. Modest in the extreme,
she never lifted the bottom of her sari to reveal the horrible scars on her legs and the fractured bones that stood out beneath
her skin. Frightened by the gangrene that was spreading through her legs, the surgeon at Hamidia Hospital had wanted to amputate.
The young woman’s opposition had been so passionate that she had awakened the entire hospital. “I’d rather die than lose my
legs!” she told the surgeon. He gave her a metal pin and a bone graft, and though Dalima had managed to keep her legs, they
were lifeless. The poor woman would be on crutches for the rest of her life, except when she allowed herself to be carried
by the former leper to whose destiny she had been lucky enough to join her own.